The news is out. If you’re not advertising in gaming, you’re missing out. Linear TV is all but dead. Streaming services and social media saw to that.
While many media buyers allocate marketing dollars to OTT ads, fewer are making in game advertising part of their media buying strategy.
As the CEO of a full service ad agency that runs winning integrated marketing campaigns for brands and businesses, I’m going to share a tactical truth with you – advertising in gaming is what’s next.
If in-game advertising and mobile game ads aren’t part of your digital media buying strategy, you’re going to fall behind in your ability to attract consumers to your brand.
I’ve said for years now that while brand loyalty used to be the gold standard in the marketing industry, only 25 percent of Americans say brand loyalty influences their purchase decisions.
The Marketing Law of Attraction, however, is alive and well. This approach to marketing understands that customers must be attracted to your brand before they will consider purchasing that brand’s products or services.
People are motivated by emotion. They are drawn to brands that are like them.
What better place to attract new customers, and younger ones at that, than in the gaming world?
There are around 3 billion active gamers globally. That’s nearly 40 percent of the human population. If you’re not advertising to that market, you’re not advertising to humanity.
People are expected to spend more than $200 billion on gaming by 2023.
Despite knowing those statistics, many marketers understand how to leverage their brands in this massive market. As the Drum reported:
“Gaming is still a massive, intangible opportunity in the minds of many advertisers.”
Many media buyers are underestimating how close we are to seeing the gaming market surpass social media as the channel most ripe for building brand awareness and generating leads and conversions.
One of the lures of gaming is that you can become part of the story. Instead of watching characters go on adventures, solve mysteries or thwart crime (or enact it!) you can become a character in the story.
With smart, on-point, well-researched and well-placed in-game ad campaigns, brands can connect that experience of being part of an epic story to their brand.
They can get consumers to transfer all the positive emotion of that experience to their brands, and create strong attraction that pulls new customers into their marketing funnel.
We’re seeing the streaming giant Netflix pick up on this with its recent acquisition of Night School Studio.
This may seem surprising at first as content studios have typically added content by buying distressed movie studios or old catalogs of movies, but now, Netflix is shifting to buy gaming studios as a way of adding content.
Netflix fully expects to include licensing opportunities, games that build on its intellectual property and standalone games in its experimentation with gaming.
While everyone else in the streaming space is growing through M&A activity, Netflix is choosing to focus on creating its own content. And, it views gaming as content, which is smart.
Even HBO Max is looking at adding gaming to its platform. Why? It’s a competition for eyeballs. Anything that takes you away from their platform, including gaming, could hurt them.
Could gaming be a potential avenue for advertisers to break into previously ad-free experiences on streaming giants like Netflix?
Only time will tell, but one thing is for sure; if you don’t jump into the gaming scene now, you’ll find yourself struggling to catch up with your competition, who most certainly will be there.
Are you struggling to figure out how to best allocate your marketing budget for 2022? The team of talented professionals at OBI Creative would love to help. Let’s talk today about how to plan an integrated marketing campaign that generates profit for your business in the year ahead.